Wednesday, August 19, 2009

OK, I bet the post title grabbed your attention. And now I have your attention I’ll explain how just 2 minutes of my time netted more sales than a £250 targetted Google Adsense campaign.

Manchester United CakeI’ve been a member of Facebook for a while now and have amased the completely average total of around 250 friends. Not bad for a 30-something guy, but not great either. But these 250 (real-life) friends helped me achieve something that all of my online marketing nouse couldn’t… Allow me to explain.

For a while now the wife and I have made a little extra income from making custom cakes and a while ago I hit upon the idea that we could generate more business by making a simple website with a small gallery. This coupled with a Google Adsense account, geo-targeted to our local area seemed like a winner of an idea. Unfortunately this idea proved fruitless and left us over £250 out of pocket, which was about the same as we currently charge for around 5 cakes! OUCH!

Fast forward a few months and I realised that for some reason I had neglected to put any cake photos onto Facebook. I just assumed that friends knew we made cakes, but as the famous saying goes “Assumption is the mother of all mistakes”. I simply added a few of my favourite cake photos to my profile and thought no more of it.

Within hours of posting 3 photos, I had received 5 firm orders for cakes along with 2 possibles and an enquiry as to whether we could cater for a buffet for 600 people.

The moral of this story is never underestimate the power of your own personal friend base, or network and never ever be afraid to show off.

Thanks to facebook we have now recouped the cost of the failed Adsense campaign and have learned to keep updating my profile with new cake and food pics as they are created.